Stay away from Buffett and do not believe a word of the ECB they made plenty bad calls

Mr Buffett makes more and more bad bets going forward as he incrweases his stake in Burlington which is neither cheap nor has it outstanding perspectives to keep earnings up rather the opposite willbe the case. Its amazing since he usually says good things but his market calls were beyond anything which could be called wise.

ECB claims a bright outlook for 2009 – they said the same thing for the second half of 2008 – well that is not suprising as economists from central banks are the same breed as the ones of wallstreet and they are wrong most of the time. The first Quarter 2009 might give the impression they look good as a monstrous government spending will hit the economies and ignite a small upmove in economies but just remember that Japan did that massively and therefor carries one of the biggest debts relatively to their GDP which was not expensive to carry as gthey have 0 interest rates now for over 15 years but that did not help and could be executed as the rest of the world was doing OK. Now with all in that same boat it will be a different ball game since at some point investors may realize these debts can never be repaid and that will burst the big bond bubble with a disastrous outcome – a collapse of most governments – probably a global moratorium. The other version is to devalue the money the own by printing money which in both cases lead to the same outcome they will be worthless.

In a filing with the SEC tonight (Wednesday), Berkshire says it bought the Burlington shares at $77 and $80 a share after ‘put’ options it sold were exercised.

During those two days, Burlington traded between a low of $73.76 and a high of $77.50. Current price: cnbc_comboQuoteMove(‘popup_BNI_ID0EUFAC15839609’);[BNI75.890.69(+0.92%)] cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“BNI”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_BNI_ID0EUFAC15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EUFAC15839609″,”off”,”false”,”inLineQuote”);

The seller of a put option is paid a certain amount of money to agree to purchase a security at a pre-determined price during a defined time period. In effect, the seller is writing an insurance policy for the buyer of the option, limiting the buyer’s potential loss on that security.

If the security goes up in price, the buyer of the option lets it expire and the seller of the option keeps the premium. If it goes down below the insured price, or ‘strike’ price, then the buyer of the option can force the seller of the option to buy the security at the strike price, even though it is higher than what the security is selling for in the open market. The seller of the option, of course, still keeps the the money it received for selling the option.

In this case, the buyers of Berkshire’s put options wanted to be protected if Burlington’s stock price wound up below $80 or $77 two months into the future. At the time, the stock was trading around $80.

According to SEC filings, Burlington sold a total of 3,261,111 put options on October 6 and October 8, for between $5.78 and $7.03 each, collecting a total ‘insurance premium’ of almost $22 million. The options could be exercised on December 8 and December 9.

Berkshire had to pay off on that policy this week by purchasing those 3,261,111 shares on Monday and Tuesday from the holders of the options. Total price: $258.6 million.

On those two days, Berkshire could have bought the same 3,261,111 shares on the open market for between $242.3 million and $251.5 million, using Burlington’s intraday highs and lows to calculate the range.

That means Berkshire spent between $7.1 and $16.3 million more for the stock than it would have cost at the market price.

But, Berkshire had already collected that premium of $22 million for selling the options in October, so it comes out ahead.

And we assume that Buffett thinks Burlington will eventually wind up higher than the upper $70s, since that’s about where he’s been buying the stock for over a year now. So he gets 3.3 million more shares at what he would consider a “good” price for the long haul.